Greedy Goblin

Tuesday, October 18, 2016

Why 1:1 trades are bad in League of Legends

I managed to bring myself back to Silver 5. Which is pretty bad. Since I was in Silver 3, there is something other than bad motor skills behind it. I'm doing something worse. I still grab dragons, I still avoid being ganked, I still gank and I must have slightly better motor skills than I had weeks ago (that improves over practice).

So I must be doing something yes-or-no wrong. And that's going for risky kills. As my motor skills and champion knowledge improved, I'm able to do things I couldn't a week ago: score a kill under enemy tower or at front of other enemies. Sure, I die often doing it, but I scored a kill, so who cares?

Well, I should, if I ever want to climb higher. 1:1 trades (kill and die) are very bad. While they are equal for the team, it's very unequal within the team. By being dead I give up farm. Sure, by killing an enemy, he also loses farm, so it seems fine. But I get behind my own teammates and those enemies who aren't dumb feeders. By getting behind, I lose control over the game. Even if the team doesn't get behind, the control is shifted to my random teammates, which naturally leads to average results: staying in Silver 5 as the median people do.

This is something that I learned in WoW but failed to adapt it: the opposing team is an obstacle to overcome. The enemy is the M&S in my own team. I should get them killed in order to get myself kills instead of sacrificing myself for getting them kills. Preserving myself should be more important than getting kills.

The most dangerous mistake I do is starting teamfights. Even if I do it right and "we" win, I die, often without any killing blow, so I get behind and my random teammates get fed. I must change my playstyle to a killer instead of a tank. I must lurk behind the others and jump in for a kill instead of letting them kill.

Philosophically: I must play as selfishly as I can. It's hard to understand why I didn't recognize it earlier.

13 comments:

Pretty much what the comments said a while ago, carry style mentality is how you climb, be as selfish as possible.

That's why they also recommended you to move away from Warwick and Nunu. Although in the current patch, Nunu is horrifically broken (in the overpowered way), and he's getting nerfed, but not a lot. Still Nunu is a support playstyle, consider stuff like Hecarim, Skarner, Zac, which has better potential.

Although sticking with Warwick and Nunu for the purposes of not depending on flashy plays is good, I'd seriously not recommend Lee Sin for example, while you don't have to be flashy, you do lose quite a lot of potential if you aren't very adept mechanically, but it's hard to screw up with Zac or Hecarim.

Consider this, the ranking for solo queue measures basically "How good are you at solo carrying" and that's it, not how good you are as a team player, nor how good you are at setting up stuff for others or anything like that, it's how good you are at carrying.

Often just forcing enemy to reatreat or useing summonerspells is worth it. There is no point in killing enemy if he has no bounty on him.

Killing (not scoring first blood) enemy that have no bounty on him, yields 300 gold. Which is more or less 10 creeps. So by not killing, but forcing enemy to reatreat to base on low-health, You does get advantage.

However, that should change dramatically if enemy HAS bounty on him. Bounty means that he killed a lot of Your teammates and killing him will yield gold for WHOLE party. This is WORTH 1:1.

As for winning and not losening games, Id say push-push-push. Games are not won by kills, but by pushing. Protect turrets, get enemy turrets whenever they can. Always do a damage control. Its better to lose teamfight but not lose any turret. That "win" teamfight but losening turret to creeps, or win it and not take any of the enemy turret. As a jungler try to focus on that, help lines that get pushed (so they wont lose turrets) and when every of Your own turret is safe, try to push one of the lines.

making gameplay changes over dropping a few divisions in a game heavily influenced by rng is a recipe for disaster esp by adopting mechanics which are questionable in the typical division of labour way. Jungle very very rarely can outcarry the core laners - but if you want more impact, play shaco and run from lane to lane until it becomes simply impossible for your team to lose them followed by splitpushing mid and late.

I am really surprised that you realise this only now. I thought you started your LoL career knowing exactly that you serve yourself AND the team best, if you maximise your own results, i.e. having your optimal k/d ratio...

I am currently enjoying "Paladins", an Overwatch-clone. The different classes and heroes really play differently and one can really experiment with all the different heroes in order to find a hero that fits one's personal playstyle.

The same applies to LoL with the different roles of the heroes in LoL. Some are better suited to progress faster than others. Most important, die as seldom as possible...

The general rule for 1 for 1/2 for 2 trades is they are only good when you're behind. The more ahead you are the more it closes the relative gold gap, especially if you give a kill bounty over. The other thing to consider is that if you dive bot 3v2 and trade 2 for 2 or 1 for one, but the enemy adc is the last remaining player with enough hp to lane he'll pick up 2 waves (aka a kill's amount of gold). This means that when a jungler, a support and an adc dive enemy adc and enemy sup, trade adc for enemy sup and the jungler has to back b/c low hp the enemy adc picks up a good amount of minion gold making it a horrible trade.

Based on current statistics, it seems like you should be playing Nunu jungle now. He has the highest winrate of all champions and is played in the jungle 95% of the time. He is also an easy to play champion that you are already familiar with/comfortable with, and you build tanky on him from the first item. I am pretty sure you can still solo dragon at level 5 (assuming you have red buff and enough time to yourself). One thing to keep in mind is that because Nunu's winrate is so high right now, his ban rate is climbing fast, so you might not be able to play him much soon.

You might also consider Dr. Mundo, another very tanky champion, and in fact might be the tankiest in the game. His winrate is mediocre because he is mostly played top, where his winrate is mediocre, while his less-played jungle winrate is fairly high. Despite building all tank, Mundo does damage comparable to offensive junglers just because his base damage is so high and he is so impossible to kill (he sticks around to do more and more damage). Very easy to play, his only skillshot is the cleaver, but that is on such a low cooldown that it doesn't really matter if you miss half of them. Not sure if he can solo dragon, though, you might try it out in a custom game to see.

I don't really agree with Hecarim, Skarner, or Zac. I wouldn't say Hecarim is easy to play at all, and he has a mediocre winrate anyway. Skarner and Zac are significantly more team dependent than Warwick, Skarner might actually be the most "support" jungler in the game.

When a player becomes better, he sees more opportunities for kills. This can lead to him stopping his efficient farming of the jungle or lane to chase maybe-kills. As you said, a kill hurts the enemy player, but if you die.. or even if you don't die... it hardly benefits you more than completing your route of the jungle camps.

But what if your jungle route is done and you have to recall or spend a lot of time running to the next camp? The opportunity cost of a kill is very low in that case. Well, it's time to gank. Ganking should be done when it doesn't interfere with efficient jungling unless an enemy champion has just handed you a 100% gank.

What is the opportunity cost of this kill? Just like EVE, ore you mine yourself is not free.

1.One of your team has died, and the enemy champion has pushed his minion wave to tower. If you are very close, then go to the lane and get the XP of the minions for free. You can also last hit if it's safe... which it probably will be because the enemy champion will back after pushing the wave. In most cases this is more efficient than continuing to jungle.

2.Sometimes 10 or more minions will stack up at a tower late game. You need to farm them if you can. That's a whole champion kill sitting there. If you don't get the XP and gold, then it might be lost or got to someone less worth it.

The general answer in LoL is : it depends. Thus it is dangerous to make generalizations that diving or trading 1 vs 1 is bad. In general one's action should be such that that after the action the likelihood of your team winning is high as possible. Sometimes trading kills 1 to 1 is the best overall action. As an example, if their team has a fed midlaner who is 5 levels higher than anyone else in the game, it is very likely that trading with him 1 to 1 is good.

Real talk: all you need to do to get to platinum is farm. It's a bit harder as a jungler but still possible to have much more gold than an average enemy just by farming. In silver as a solo lane you should be a full item ehead of your opponent in 15 minutes. As a jungler you farm, then gank whenever you have your ultimate up, then farm again untill it's up.

Coming from a D1 top/jungle main (back when I actually played 2 years ago).

1:1 trades are not always bad. they are actually very good if you sacrifice yourself to kill a superior player.

Think of it like this: players are not equal. Give them all a value. Add the values for both sides. The higher sum wins. Let's say average is 100. Let's say you are 102. Let's say your team is 93 102 105 111 120 and the enemy team is 97 98 101 106 157. You will lose that game. BUT, if despite your inferior skill, you can kamikaze yourself into the enemy 157, and neuter him so that HE can't control the game, you will have turned a loss into a win.

I successfully use this strategy in War Thunder. In that game, you can hit tab to see the stats of both teams. If I see that the enemy team has 1 or 2 aces who are far outperforming their team, which is common, I focus on killing them, and I will even suicide ram them if they give me the chance, because doing so is a huge net gain for my team.